


what happens in metropolis

by itllbeall-dwight (dupesoclock)



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Saw Timeline!Dwight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:35:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27124589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dupesoclock/pseuds/itllbeall-dwight
Summary: “I-I know who you are.”The phrase was somewhat unnerving, coming from the man in the glasses now staring very intently at him as his head almost snapped back to look at him. The detective hesitated for a moment. “Y… yeah?”—The Jigsaw case had encompassed his entire life in the months leading up to the Entity sweeping him away from the cold floor of the warehouse. But it was much more than his life that those murders had touched.
Relationships: David Tapp & Dwight Fairfield
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	what happens in metropolis

**Author's Note:**

> i live specifically for me and me only and this is where my life fails me.
> 
> I've had this really specific self-indulgent hc for a while that Dwight was a) from nyc, and b) around for the jigsaw murders, leading to a whole bunch of paranoia, especially after the incident with lazar, and thus he attaches himself to tap and is also deathly fucking afraid of amanda. which coincides nicely with my "tapp is a better leader by default but instead chooses to coach dwight" hc. hi. 
> 
> kudos and comments appreciated, also if you liked this and you can, the tumblr mirror is [here](https://itwillbeall-dwight.tumblr.com/post/632529023681052672/what-happens-in-metropolis), so i'd appreciate it if you spread it. thank you!

Waking up by the campfire was like waking up from a bad hangover. There was a thump in his head and the taste of iron in the back of his throat, as he shielded his eyes from the distant light of fire. As he stirred, the little company residing by the flames paid him mind, checking on his condition, asking who he was with a pity in his eyes that he didn’t quite understand. But he told them regardless - he was David Tapp, a detective from the Metropolitan PD (former, though they didn’t need to know that, not yet), and, as far as he remembered, he was investigating the Jigsaw murders.

They didn’t know much, about the fog and forest that surrounded them, but the redheaded Meg told him what they knew, introducing him around the camp at the few people that were there - some of them were in a ‘trial’, she’d said, while also adding she’d explain that later, as well - trying to make him feel as at ease as he could be in the situation they were in. He sat down on a log as she went off to talk to the girl in the beanie again, taking his hat off and rubbing the back of his neck, looking down at the dull police badge that hung around his neck, almost mocking him at a false sense of status.

“I, um- hey.”

A voice next to him made him look up, meeting the eyes of a man in glasses, fiddling with his tie. The leader of the group, Meg had said. Dwight was his name. Tapp forced a small smile. “Uh… hey.”

“Do you, um…” He seemed oddly nervous, avoiding eye contact and simply moving a hand to gesture to the seat next to the detective. “Do you mind i-if I-”

He silently moved aside, letting the younger man sit down, oddly tense and awkwardly keeping his eyes on the fire in front of them, or maybe to the conversation quickly growing heated between the beanie girl and the tall brutish young man just across from the campfire. Tapp followed his eyes, leaning forward with his elbows on his legs-

“I-I know who you are.”

The phrase was somewhat unnerving, coming from the man in the glasses now staring very intently at him as his head almost snapped back to look at him. The detective hesitated for a moment. “Y… yeah?”

“...That sounded… really bad- god, I-I’m sorry, I just- I- argh, dammit-”

“No, no, you’re good, kid.”

He inhaled, and exhaled, wringing his hands as if to calm himself down. “You’re… Detective David Tapp, aren’t you? You were investigating the Jigsaw murders. I-I saw your… your memorial, on TV.”

A breath caught in his throat, if only for a moment, as he tried not to think about the thought of a send off when he still was still alive, in… some capacity. “I… see.”

There was an empty silence after that revelation, with Dwight still keeping his eyes on the man as he swallowed, seeming to try and wrap his head around the idea that someone had watched him live and die. “You did an a-amazing job, if it… means anything.”

He sighed, sitting up, his voice lower, as if not to alert the others - better not to spread the secret too far… at least, not yet. “Did they catch the bastard?”

He paused. “I… yeah. They caught one of them, I-I think. Kind of. He, uh… died.”

There was a quiet growl from the man. Of course there had to be more than one. For a moment, he thought back to the doctor he was tailing - just who else was involved in those twisted games of playing god? And if not him, who was it?

They didn’t speak much more on it, after that, as the trial had concluded and a hand slapped down on his shoulder, introductions moving swiftly on and leaving the young man who knew too much about him with his mouth hanging open. 

Despite their first meeting, Dwight was a capable leader, Tapp soon learned. He was a kind man, sacrificial to a point, nowhere near as much of a coward as he’d initially thought, as he watched him push his friends over to take a slash from a machete or a pair of mangled claws. He made plans, gave orders - no matter the weak disposition it was given in, one that felt like paper in a strong breeze - and protected those who he called his friends, no matter the teasing and harsh words thrown his way by a select few. He was a man trying to prove himself, either to those around him or…

Tapp had learned what trials were, soon enough, guided by Claudette as they tried to evade the Trapper, a large, tall man, armed with a machete and bear traps, as if he was hunting down small game in the forest… in a way, that was almost accurate. That trial, while stressful, soon passed in success, and while the whole situation was still unbelievable, he soon found himself oddly adapting to the new world in the fog that he found himself in - get in, try not to die, repair generators, and leave. It didn’t take long for him to take the initiative and start giving input on plans of attack, earning a joking comment from the old gambler of the group that maybe he was better made for the leadership position than who was currently in employ. He tried to ignore that, for Dwight’s sake. 

This should have been no different. Though this was his first time in the Autohaven Wreckers, loud annoyed groaning from Nea when the fog cleared was enough to make him think that this wasn’t going to be easy. After catching sight of Laurie and Dwight, the four of them split off, aiming to find generator’s around the wrecker’s yard, for efficiency’s sake. One was already powered by the time he spotted a pair of blinking lights… but between the trees, something else caught his eyes. A box, not like anything he’d seen previously, steel casing rusted, though untouched. But the box, while interesting in its own right, wasn’t what made him approach the damn thing.

It was the monochromatic ventriloquist dummy sat on top. 

Seeing that bastard puppet was enough to make him approach slowly, staring at the box it sat upon - it was like seeing an old friend, but one you’d want to snap the neck of. And it stared back, almost mocking him. His stomach turned. Had Gordon followed him? That had to be who this was, right? Tapp gritted his teeth, wanting to punch the damn thing off of its torture throne, but knowing that would probably alert…  _ someone _ to where he was, someone he didn’t want to know. So he forced himself to tear away, fists clenched. It was like wading through water as he crouched down by a nearby generator, pulling at levers and twisting at cogs to make it sigh and whir… though that puppet never stopped looking at him. And he never stopped looking back, until-

A loud scream made him duck behind the generator for a moment, wincing at the grinding of metal against a scrap wall, and the begging, the  _ pleading _ … no one had ever reacted like that before. The curiosity was enough to make him look around the mechanical device to catch a glance of the Jigsaw killer.

He recognised her movements, and the way she carried herself almost right away, and the way he kicked himself would have made him double over. Of course Amanda was involved - the bastard broke her down, and rebuilt her in his own design. And now, she was just as much of a prisoner as he was, stuck in the fog with nothing to do but suffer at the hands of her fate. Though she took hers with pride, it seemed. She  _ enjoyed _ the hunt, the chase and the kill. Was she too far gone to be saved from that which she thought had first saved her? He couldn’t entirely say. 

The philosophical waxing had to be paused, though, as quiet, panicked whimpers made him stop, hands hovering over the generator he was about to resume repairing. He listened to the strained, weakened breathing, almost holding his own to listen. It was just in front of him, where the attack had failed. Slowly standing to his feet, the detective did what he did best - keeping his posture low as to not be spotted by the pig-headed woman, he went to investigate.

It was Dwight, hidden behind a wall with his back pressed against it, and he was in a bad way, holding onto the space around in his collarbone, blood staining his palms as he tried to muffle his panicked That wasn’t what originally drew the detective’s attention, however, as a familiar helmet was strapped to his head, almost entirely covering his face. He felt his stomach drop.

“...Fairfield-” He kept his voice quiet, but it still startled the nervous man, who only started to panic more, it seemed. He put a hand on Dwight’s shoulder, and god, was he shaking under his grip. “Right, right, just breathe, kid.” 

Tired eyes look up at him from inside the helmet, strained and shallow breaths from hyperventilation making his chest move up and down at a worrying pace. He couldn’t say anything, he only held Tapp’s arm in place to keep him there.

“C’mon, you got this, in and out.”

Dwight soon followed instructions, taking as much care as he could to breathe, though he hiccuped and stuttered from tears every so often.

“Yeah… there you go. That’s it.” It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Tapp gave the man a gentle nod, digging into his belt for a couple of medical supplies he’d scraped together earlier in the trial. “Let’s get you up and at ‘em, yeah?”

He calmed down enough to start panic rambling, and the way he switched from one extreme to another was almost welcome, as Tapp gently wrapped the bandaged over the deep cut from the hidden blade. Dwight spoke of before the fog, when he was alone in his shitty apartment with nothing but two birds to keep him company, barely earning enough to afford to live, but surviving by the skin of his teeth every month when the rent was due. He’d hardly slept before, but murders on your doorstep didn’t make it any better, especially since they were targeting the average man, just like him. And after an accident he conveniently skipped around, his paranoia only got worse.

“I-I saw one, once.” He stuttered, voice almost echoing through the trap on his head, as Tapp tied off the gauze.

“A murder?”

“A trap. In the open. A-and no one could do anything about it, I saw it on my way to work. The girl, she was- I… god, they just-”

“Fuckin’ Christ…”

“Yeah… yeah, that. Exactly that.” The leader gave a weak smile, moreso to comfort himself than anything else, it seemed, wincing as he rolled his shoulder. “OK… what now?”

“We’ve gotta that off you. Did she… explain the rules?”

“I… no, but I-I think I’ve got it.” Dwight started to shuffle where he was curled up, trying to get to his feet, but he was still somewhat shaky, like a newborn fawn, leaning on the wall of scrap as well as Tapp for support. He inhaled, and exhaled, breath still short. “There were… boxes, I think the key is in there.”

Of course, that made the most sense, it seemed. “Right. You start heading to one of those, and I’ll-”

From across the yard, a generator powered on, and from where they sat, the clock started counting down. 

That only started to send Dwight off again, eyes growing wide with fear as he looked back to the detective, who seemed equally as stunned. It seemed like she’d been busy, workshopping her craft.

As the leader started to buckle under his own weight again, Tapp grabbed onto his arm - not too hard, but just firm enough to keep him in place - and began looking around between trees for that bastard puppet that he’d seen earlier in the trial. As he tried to keep them both out of sight, he heard the stifled breathing behind him, as the leader tried to calm himself down while the two leaned around a tree, watching the Pig chase after the determined blonde in the blue shirt. He reached to grip onto Tapp’s shoulders, knuckles going white from the force, palms sweaty. Tapp put a hand on top of one, and gently tapped at it for a silent comfort. Once the killer was well distracted, he led Dwight to the first box. No luck.

A second box, on the same side of the junkyard. A quarter of the time gone. Nothing.

Box three, on a hill besides the dingy old shack. Half time. Nothing.

Now with only one box left, the leader was growing more frantic. Tapp held onto his wrist as he pulled him around the killer shack, pressing his back against the wall, his own heartbeat in his ears matching the beeping from the helmet. He looked back to the younger survivor.

“It’s just up ahead. Go.”

“She k-knows I’m- I-I’ll die, I’m going t-to-”

“I’ll cover you. Go, grab your life.” He was firm in his demand. But still, the leader didn’t move. He repeated, raising his voice a little. “Go!”

Dwight followed that order, practically stumbling over himself to leap to the box and shove his hands into it, wincing as his hands dug into needles and thorns on the inside that he couldn’t see.

And while the detective’s eye followed him, he noticed someone else following him as well, concealed in the grass, ready to pounce. He gritted his teeth, silently asking her to forgive him someday for what he was about to do (and what he had already done), before reaching down by the entrance to the old shack and grabbing a handful of pebbles. Tapp weighed these in his hand for a moment, before tossing them in her direction.

Bullseye. He heard her squeal from the hit, before growling and standing to her feet, turning in the detective’s direction, where he made no attempt to hide himself, ready to throw another rock should she choose to ignore him. “...Fancy meeting you here.”

“Could say the same to you.”

“I hadn’t realised I wasn’t the only pig that they’d let out of the slaughterhouse. I would have thrown a party for your arrival,  _ Detective _ .”

The bite of her words was venomous, purposely crafted to throw him off, but he did not let it show. He still looked her in the eyes and stood his ground, until he could smell the rotting pig head she wore. “Would have appreciated it a lot more than this, Ms. Young.”

“Tell me, Detective,” Now Amanda, she was a woman of wearier disposition, broken from circumstances, but this new woman, a woman made of a pig? She thrived in the violence and the fear. That much he deducted, from the way she looked up at him, and though it was hard to see her eyes, he could almost see the fire in them. “Are you sure this is the game you want to play?”

For a moment, Tapp’s eyes fell behind her head, where Dwight had taken his hands out of the box, dripping with blood and sweat and shaking from fatigue and stress, before looking back to her. “It isn’t a game I haven’t played before. I can dance.”

He tried to lead her some distance away from the puppet-adorned box where they leader still struggled, but the Pig was no fool, catching him by surprise in an open area with a knife to the gut, pinning him to the floor in his surprise with a wrist blade to his neck, threatening to slice it open a second time. The detective gritted his teeth, both from the pain and the strain of pushing her arm away, until he was just able to push her off of him, scrambling to his feet and blocking the entrance to the shack with the palette at the door. He took the time she was taking to break the obstacle to leave the shack, with no choice to run closer to the trap box, closer to Dwight, to a small collection of scrap metal walls, formed with another wooden palette and a window frame, which he quickly vaulted over to avoid a failed swipe.

“Dwight!” He looked back as he ran the killer around a long wall connecting to the window, still seeing the leader digging through the box, loud beeping ever imminent. “Dwight, come on!”

The timer was so close to flatlining, and Dwight wasn’t doing too hot, panicking as he tried to find some solace in the cold metal expanse in front of him.

Tapp quickly slammed the palette down onto the killer’s head, hearing her squeal as he stood there, breath catching in his throat. “Dwight!”

He pulled his hand out of the box with a key in hand, quickly unlocking the mechanism and ripping the trap off of his head as it snapped open, surely to be his end if he’d messed up just once more. Breathing heavily, he felt along his face, blood gathering on his fingers from where the rusted teeth had dug into his cheeks, among the cuts and bruises from rummaging through the boxes to find his life. 

The detective was almost so caught up in himself that he didn’t hear the growl and the sound of the palette breaking behind him, the adrenaline kicking in to push him forward into a sprint, taking hold of Dwight again and pulling him along as the Pig gathered herself, and got back on their trail. “C’mon, time to go.”

They were lucky to make it just in time, a failed swipe from the killer catching at their back as they ran into the fog where she couldn’t chase them. Tapp looked down, finally letting go of the younger man and placing a hand on his shoulder. “You OK?”

A breathless laugh escaped him, as he looked up to Tapp. “I- I- you- we- ...I’m alive. I’m  _ alive _ !”

The detective smiled, about to say something before he was cut off from a tight hug, the younger survivor happily crying into his chest, getting snot all over the front of his vest. Tapp’s hands hovered for a moment, not entirely sure how to react, before he finally decided to just pat his back. 

“Thank you, thank you so much, thank you-”

“Hey, slow down, catch a breath.” He couldn’t help but laugh a little, though it was a lot more awkward than the few times he’d had to comfort lost kids who came into the station. Still, Dwight appreciated it regardless.

“Well, you guys seem just fine and dandy.”

Dwight pulled himself away suddenly, looking up as he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, as Laurie finally joined them in escaping the trial, sheepishly stepping away. “I… yeah.”

She gave the two of them a look, almost fond. “Nea said she knew where the hatch was, and while I wanted to stay to see her out here, I’m almost glad I didn’t. You’d never hear the end of it.”

“Wouldn’t put it past her.” Tapp chipped in, as the young woman nodded, flipping the flashlight she’d brought with her between two hands.

The three of them returned to the campfire, Dwight and Laurie sharing a small conversation, taking care to almost dote on his face wounds from the trap he’d barely escaped from, while Tapp listened along. Dwight had almost recovered from the ordeal, though his voice still shook, and it made him think. They knew each other… or at least, he knew of the detective, of the traps, of the killings. How intimately was still up to debate, but the way he reacted in the trial told him that it was something that had deeply disturbed him. And while he’d never been much of a leader himself, but Dwight looked up to him, in the way a student did a teacher - protection, and guidance. Was it because of his attachment to the case? He didn’t deserve the title, or the treatment (he’d still failed, on the larger scale, of Dwight’s account of the public execution trap was to be believed), but if one person still believed in him despite his failures… then he had to get out, if only for that. 

He needed to catch the Jigsaw killer, or whatever was left of them as a collective. For the sake of people just like Dwight.


End file.
